Appeal No. 2003-1920
Application No. 09/538,455
combined disclosures of Higdon and Upchurch.6 To establish a
prima facie case of obviousness under Section 103, there must be
some teaching or suggestion in Higdon and Upchurch to arrive at
the claimed subject matter. In re Bell 991 F.2d 781, 782, 26
USPOQ2d 1529, 1531 (Fed. Cir. 1993). In evaluating the contents
of Higdon and Upchurch for such a purpose, it is proper to take
into account not only the specific teachings therein, but also
the inferences which one skilled in the art would reasonably
expected to draw therefrom. In re Preda, 401 F.2d 825, 826, 159
USPQ 342, 344 (CCPA 1968).
The content of the Higdon disclosure is discussed above.
The appellants only argue that Higdon and Upchurch do not teach
or suggest placing filters at the claimed locations of a stream
switching system. We do not agree.
We find that in addition to the above disclosure, Higdon
further discloses (column 6, lines 58-63) that:
Also present in certain embodiments are filters located
so as to filter out contaminates from the fluid streams
being switched by the valve assembly 30. For instance,
typically, a 0.2 to 5 micron contaminant size disk
filter is located in the output port 26 and other such
filters in each of the input fittings 18.
6 According to the appellants (Brief, page 10), “[c]laims
13-17 stand or fall together.”
7
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