New patent procedure rules set for July 1 On July 1 the Patent & Trademark Office will have in place new procedures which it hopes will assure the quality and reliability of U.S. patents, as well as provide an alternative to the costly court proceedings now necessary if anyone wants to challenge the validity of a patent. The new re-examination procedures were mandated in a law passed in the last Congress. Under the new rules any person, including the patent holder, an outside party, or the patent commissioner, may request a re-examination of a patent to determine its validity. All requests for re-examination will be published in the patent office's Official Gazette. Any request must include, among other things, a statement pointing out each substantial new question of patentability based on prior patents and printed publications; an identification of every claim for which reexamination is requested and a detailed explanation of the pertinency and manner of applying the cited prior art to each claim; and a copy of every patent or printed publication relied upon or referred to in the request. The patent office has three months in which to decide whether a re-examination is warranted. If it is, the patent owner will be notified and will have two months in which to reply to the issues raised by the requestor, who will then have an additional two months in which to make a rebuttal. The re-examination then will be conducted with, the patent office says, "special dispatch." At the end of the proceedings a certificate will be issued setting forth the results of the re-examination and the content of the patent following the re-examination. Any person dissatisfied with the result can appeal to the patent office's Board of Appeals, and ultimately to the U.S. Court of Customs & Patent Appeals. D
Chemist to lead Chinese science academy In a move that appears to signal an enhanced role and influence for scientists in China's scientific affairs, the People's Republic of China has picked a prominent physical chemist to head its academy of sciences. Meeting in Beijing recently, the academy's presidium elected Lu
Structure of Matter, a CAS unit. Also a vice-president of the Chinese Chemical Society, he represented it at the meeting of world chemical society presidents at American Chemical Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., in September 1979 (C&EN, Oct. 1,1979, page 44). Lu's scientific work has focused on the structural chemistry of cluster compounds and, recently, on structural models of nitrogen fixation enzymes. In 1979, the Chinese State Council conferred on him the title of "national model worker." D
Iraqi reactor capable of making plutonium Lu: first scientist to head academy
Jiaxi, 65, and six vice presidents—all but one of them scientists—to twoyear terms of office. Only the third president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) since the People's Republic was founded in 1949, Lu is the first scientist to head it. His predecessors were Guo Moruo, a specialist in the humanities (1949-78), and Fang Yi, a veteran administrator, vice premier, and member of the Communist Party's Politburo, who is in charge of China's science and education. Official Chinese sources also call Lu "the first person to rise to this position through democratic elections." CAS—like the Soviet Academy of Sciences on which it originally was modeled—operates research institutes covering a wide range of subjects (117 institutions with a total staff of 75,000, including 36,000 research workers). Putting its leadership into the hands of scientists is part of a general revamping of CAS undertaken at the first meeting of its scientific council since 1960. The new president has spent much of his career in the coastal province of Fujian, opposite Taiwan. He earned a chemistry degree from Xiamen University there, and received a Ph.D. in 1939 from the University of London. After two years of postdoctoral work in radiochemistry in London, he did research in structural chemistry with Linus Pauling at California Institute of Technology. After returning to China in 1945, he served as professor of chemistry and held administrative posts at Xiamen and Fuzhou universities, and headed Fujian Institute of Research on the
The Israeli bombing of the nearly completed Osirak nuclear research reactor outside of Baghdad, Iraq, last week halted for some time the possibility that Iraq will be able to produce plutonium to make a nuclear weapon. If that was indeed the motive for building the Iraqi reactor, it could have produced enough plutonium each year for about one bomb. The demolished reactor was modeled on the French Osiris research reactor built in the mid-1960's. It is a light-water-cooled, tank-type reactor that uses highly enriched uranium to produce a high neutron density for research. This fuel is about 93% fissionable uranium-235, and frequently is called weapons-grade uranium. But the possession of this uranium by Iraq does not seem to be a problem. The reactor uses about 16 kg of fuel per loading, and the agreement with France insists that when the French supply new fuel elements they take back the used core for reprocessing in France. So only 16 kg of the highly enriched fuel would be in Iraq at a time, and it is not likely Iraq could build a bomb from that small amount. As a research reactor, the 70-MW Iraqi plant could be put to many uses. It is a large reactor but not exceptional, as many such plants these days exceed 100 MW of thermal power. Its uses range from neutron-scattering studies (probably the largest scientific research area) and making new radioisotopes for medical treatment and diagnosis, to the development of new materials for fusion power reactors. The reactor could be used, however, for making plutonium-239. Irradiating the common uranium-238 isotope with neutrons in the reactor June 15, 1981 C&EN
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