A Reference to a Classic

On Wednesday, we had a training and discussion session (via Teams, rather than in person) on the finer points of 35 U.S.C. 112(b), and when and how to write a rejection of a claim for being indefinite. (What I say here is not to be construed as authoritative advice from the Patent Office.) There were several hypothetical examples, stated as being hypothetical, not from actual patent applications. One of them went roughly like this: “A method comprising: performing a medical procedure on a patient; assessing said patient’s condition after said medical procedure; and analyzing said condition to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the procedure, said conclusions being applied in performing said medical procedure.”

I commented in chat, “From the inventor of time travel?”

A few minutes later, I wrote: “I had an esprit d’escalier; I should have asked whether the inventor was Dr. Kwei-fei Mendoza. For those insufficiently familiar with the classics, she appears in one of Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. She works in a hospital on the Moon in the twenty-third century, and provides medical treatment to sick or injured Patrolmen.”