Appeal No. 2004-0638
Application No. 10/038,975
We also are in full agreement with the examiner that the use
of the claimed ethylene oxide feed in the conventional process of
preparing 1,3-propanediol would have been obvious to one of
ordinary skill in the art within the meaning of § 103. We
subscribe to the examiner's reasoning that "[n]or is there any
reason seen why one would be concerned if the starting material
contained 50 ppm of aldehyde when it is known that the amount of
the aldehyde that will be present in the product is 5,400 times
greater than in the starting material" (page 8 of Answer, last
paragraph). Since the amount of aldehyde in the starting
material is insignificant relative to the amount present in the
ultimate product, we concur with the examiner that "[n]o reason
is seen for one to go to great expense to make the starting
material highly pure with no resulting benefit in the purity of
the product" (id.). We further agree with the examiner that if
it was discovered in the prior art that the presence of greater
than 50 ppm acetaldehyde in the ethylene oxide feed presented a
problem, thereby necessitating a more highly purified feed, it
logically follows that prior to this discovery that practitioners
in the prior art were performing the claimed process having a
higher level of acetaldehyde impurity in the ethylene oxide feed.
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