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Sufficiency of disclosure is an important Patent Law requirement to be met by a patent in order to be validly granted. According to this requirement, an Invention must be described in the Application or patent in a sufficiently clear and complete manner to enable the Person Skilled In The Art to carry out the invention. This requirement is found in most national patent jurisdictions, if not all. The disclosure requirement lies at the heart and origin of patent law. A State or Government grants an Inventor a Monopoly for a given period of time in exchange for the inventor disclosing to the public how to make or practice her invention. If a patent fails to contain such information, then the bargain is violated, and the patent is unenforceable. In Europe an patent law, when the description of an invention in a patent or patent application fails to meet the disclosure requirement, it often means as a result that the invention is not Industrially Applicable . For instance, if a patent application relates to an invention in the field of Cold Fusion but if said application does not provide the person skilled in the art with enough experimental parameters to successfully carrying out the invention, i.e. cold fusion, the invention is not applicable in an industry, and cannot be patented. The word "specification" is often used to refer to the written description of how to make and use the invention. In United States Patent Law , the specification must be complete enough so that a person of "ordinary skill in the art" of the invention can make and use the invention without “undue experimentation". There is no precise definition of “undue experimentation" in U.S. patent law. The standard is determined based on the art of the invention. In the "predictable arts", such as Mechanical inventions and Software inventions, very little description is required. A mere flow chart of a piece of software, for example, is adequate. Source code is not normally required. In the “unpredictable arts”, such as Chemistry and Pharmaceuticals , a very complete description is required. In a recent U.S. court case, several of Jerome H. Lemelson patents covering bar code readers were held to be invalid because the specification was not complete enough for a person of ordinary skill in the art of electrical engineering to have made and used the claimed invention at the time the patent was filed ( 1954 ) without undue experimentation. In this case the court held that a person of ordinary skill in the art was a degreed Electrical Engineer with two years of experience as of the filing date of the original patent application, 1954. One of the challenges of this court case, which was decided in 2005 , was to find experts on the state of the art who were alive in 1954. BEST MODE REQUIREMENT In the United States , the sufficiency of disclosure requirement is complemented by an additional requirement, generally not found in other national patent jurisdictions: the "best mode requirement". According to the requirement, the disclosure must also contain the inventor's "best mode" of making or practicing the invention. For example, if an inventor knows that a liquid should be heated to 250 degrees for optimal performance, but discloses in the patent that the liquid should be heated to "above 200 degrees", then the inventor has not disclosed his "best mode" for carrying out the invention. The "best mode requirement" only applies to what the inventor knows at the time the application was filed, not as to what was subsequently discovered. FURTHER READING
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