EMIL FISCHER

Almost every other examiner at the PTO never used the "shoes" in Art Unit N Heterocycles, where I worked, or in any other Art Units nearby. I never understood that fact. The "shoes" were hard copies of US and some foreign patents that you could manually search according to classification rules. One day I was doing a "shoe" search on some N heterocycle...or some other small molecule, and at the bottom of the shoes, in the N heterocycle Art Unit, in shoes near to the floor of the search room, I came across a whole bunch of patents awarded to the inventor Emil Fischer. I recognized the name "Emil Fischer" as a famous German chemist who, like 5 or 6 other people of the surname Fischer, won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry. The patents were about various nucleotide or nucleoside derivatives...they were modifications of the natural purine and pyrimidine N rich biomolecules. They were all patents from a European Patent Office I believe. I was very intrigued by the discovery I made in the "shoes" that day. I often searched the shoes to try to find previous patent documents that anticipated the application art I was examining. I don't remember if I used any documents from the shoes in any of my office actions. I believe that probably 1 out of 1000 patent documents turns out to be valuable ultimately in a monetary sense. The other 999 patents out of 1000 are not of monetary value. But 1000 out of 1000 patents represent the technology and the "state of the art" in the World at any given moment. And 1000 out of 1000 patents can be considered a rich literature...both good literature and bad literature...that the scientific enterprise learns from and documents. All patents represent a rich literature thus.