US President George W. Bush's administration is considering a drive to overturn a recent UN vote and revive work on a global treaty that would ban medical research on stem cells, diplomats said today.
In a setback for the White House and a victory for the scientific community, the UN General Assembly's 191-nation legal committee voted only last month to sideline the treaty for two years.
But the proposal to defer the drafting process until 2005 was approved by a margin of just 80 to 79 with 15 abstentions, and the issue is scheduled to resurface in the full General Assembly next Monday. The assembly's membership is identical to that of its legal committee.
The treaty started out two years ago as a plan to prohibit the cloning of human beings. But Bush administration - with the backing of the US anti-abortion movement and many predominantly Catholic countries - wanted it expanded to outlaw both human cloning and cloning human cells for scientific research purposes.
In anticipation of next week's assembly meeting, the United States and its allies plan to meet at the United Nations tomorrow to devise a strategy for reversing the committee vote, diplomats said.
US officials said they would have no comment on their plans until later this week.
There is almost universal support at the United Nations for a treaty banning human cloning, but the international community is deeply divided over therapeutic cloning.