Appeal No. 2006-2053 Application No. 10/196,109 BACKGROUND The appellants’ invention relates to a medical instrument for dissecting tissue in the human or animal body (specification, p. 1) and has as its primary objective the provision of a force transmission element therein that is flexible enough to follow the path of a bent shaft and yet capable of transmitting a force from at least one movable grip to at least one movable tool. A copy of the claims under appeal is set forth in the appendix to the appellants’ brief. The examiner relies upon the following as evidence of unpatentability: Chin US 5,582,618 Dec. 10, 1996 Recuset US 5,741,286 Apr. 21, 1998 The rejections of claims 1-5, 9 and 33 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being anticipated by Recuset and claims 10-12 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as being unpatentable over Recuset in view of Chin are before us for review in this appeal. Rather than reiterate in their entirety the conflicting viewpoints advanced by the examiner and the appellants regarding this appeal, we make reference to the examiner's answer (mailed June 1, 2005) for the examiner's complete reasoning in support of the rejections and to the appellants’ brief (filed March 1, 2004) and reply brief (filed July 14, 2005) for the appellants’ arguments thereagainst. OPINION In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the appellants’ specification and claims, to the applied prior art, and to the 2Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007