Opinion of the Court
Decisions such as Wood and Minerals Separation establish that a specification may call for a reasonable amount of experimentation to make and use a patented invention. What is reasonable in any case will depend on the nature of the invention and the underlying art. See Minerals Separation, 242 U. S., at 270–271; see also Mowry v. Whitney, 14 Wall. 620, 644 (1872) (“[T]he definiteness of a specification must vary with the nature of its subject. Addressed as it is to those skilled in the art, it may leave something to their skill in applying the invention.”). But in allowing that much tolerance, courts cannot detract from the basic statutory requirement that a patent’s specification describe the invention “in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art” to “make and use” the invention. §112(a). Judges may no more subtract from the requirements for obtaining a patent that Congress has prescribed than they may add to them. See Bilski v. Kappos, 561 U. S. 593, 602–603, 612 (2010).
III
With these principles in mind, we return to claims 19 and 29 of the ’165 patent and claim 7 of the ’741 patent. In doing so, we do not doubt that Amgen’s specification enables the 26 exemplary antibodies it identifies by their amino acid sequences. Even Sanofi concedes that description is enough to allow a person skilled in the art to make and use those embodiments. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 68. But the claims before us sweep much broader than those 26 antibodies. And we agree with the lower courts that Amgen has failed to enable all that it has claimed, even allowing for a reasonable degree of experimentation.
would have no difficulty in adopting the improvement, and making suitable curves”); Tilghman v. Proctor, 102 U. S. 707, 732–733 (1881) (upholding claim for process of separating fats and oils even though the specification “suggests a trial … with different degrees of heat so as to ascertain that which is best for each particular kind of fat”).
