Appeal No. 2006-1610
Application No. 09/826,420
station for sterilizing a medical article inside the housing,
and sealing the medical article within the housing. McGowan
also teaches that it was known in the art to have a preheating
area for increasing the activity of ethylene oxide, a
sterilizing agent. Although McGowan teaches that the
sterilizing devices of the prior art had the drawback of the
length of time required for the process, we find no merit in
appellants' argument that McGowan provides a teaching away from
utilizing a preheating step to the extent that it would have
been nonobvious to one of ordinary skill in the art. Rather, we
fully concur with the examiner that one of ordinary skill in the
art would have found it obvious to balance the tradeoff between
a preheating step and the overall time of the process in
determining the optimum operating parameters for the
sterilization process. It is well settled that the optimization
of result-effective variables is a matter of obviousness for one
of ordinary skill in the art. In re Boesch, 617 F.2d 272, 276,
205 USPQ 215, 219 (CCPA 1980). In referencing McGowan's
teaching that length of time required for preheating is a
drawback, appellants erroneously remark that "[t]he important
thing is what did the author of the '203 [McGowan] patent think"
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