Appeal No. 2006-2333
Application No. 10/280,849
of Section 103 in view of the applied prior art. Accordingly,
we will sustain the examiner’s rejection for the reasons set
forth in the answer, which we incorporate herein, and we add
the following for emphasis only.
Mulvihill, as explained by the examiner, teaches a method
for recovering proteins and enzymes from a raw liquid milk
product by utilizing ethanol as a precipitating agent.
Although claim 1 on appeal is not limited to using acetone as a
precipitating agent, the examiner relies upon Voelter for
establishing the obviousness of using either ethanol or acetone
for precipitating proteins and enzymes from raw liquid milk
products. We note that appellants do not contest the
examiner’s legal conclusion that it would have been obvious to
use either ethanol or acetone as a precipitating agent.
A principal argument advanced by the appellants is that
Mulvihill discloses a conventional method of precipitating
proteins and enzymes by adding up to about 40 % ethanol, but
this has been shown by appellants to not be sufficient to
precipitate substantially all of the milk proteins (page 4 of
brief, second paragraph). However, we concur with the examiner
that there is no meaningful distinction between the claimed
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