Appeal No. 2004-1937
Application No. 09/086,033
optimal abatement [of fluorine gas]” (request, page 4). Whether
one skilled in the art can make these determinations relates to
the issue of enablement which is irrelevant to the written
description issue raised by the examiner’s rejection and resolved
in our decision. This is because conclusive evidence of a
claim’s enablement is not equally conclusive of a claim’s
compliance with written description. In re Curtis, 354 F.3d
1347, 1357, 69 USPQ2d 1274, 1282 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
The appellant further argues that possession of the claimed
subject matter under consideration would have been conveyed by
his Figure 4/Test 4 disclosure in combination with the
specification disclosure on lines 1-18 of page 8. This
specification disclosure relates to the use of a reducing agent
such as sodium thiosulfate or potassium iodide to increase
fluorine gas abatement and to inhibit formation of OF2 wherein
the reducing agent is added to the water scrubber unit in
response to a monitoring means such as a pH monitoring device
whereby the reducing agent is introduced at a rate and in an
amount correlated to the sensed pH value. However, neither the
specification nor the drawing contains any teaching which relates
this page 8 disclosure to the Figure 4/Test 4 disclosure
concerning pH range. Indeed, the absence of a relationship
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