Appeal No. 2002-1102
Application No. 09/329,591
appellants’ drawing as admitted prior art. Instead, McBrayer
relates to a method and apparatus for reacting oxidizable
material with a salt at temperatures and pressures that are in
the vicinity of supercritical conditions for water.
Therefore, while McBrayer does indeed disclose a pH
detecting means, sodium hydroxide supply means and control means
for ameliorating corrosion problems in his apparatus, no basis
exists for concluding that an artisan with ordinary skill would
have considered this disclosure applicable to the PCB decomposing
apparatus of the admitted prior art. Stated otherwise, no basis
exists for believing that the admitted prior art apparatus for
decomposing PCB suffers from corrosion problems of the type
disclosed and solved by McBrayer in the context of his entirely
disparate apparatus for reacting oxidizable matter with a salt.
Even if the admitted prior art apparatus were assumed to suffer
from some type of corrosion problem, no basis exists for
believing that this problem would have been solved with the same
means and in the same way which McBrayer found to be appropriate
for his different apparatus.
Under these circumstances, we can only assume that the
examiner, in proposing to combine the applied prior art in the
manner discussed above, has fallen victim “to the insidious
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