I'd say you hit the nail on the head, Daniel, but we're talking about PETA here. Some creative metaphoring is in order.

The deadline of 2012 is ridiculous, not only from a scientific standpoint (lots and lots of work to do) but from a regulatory one, presuming a candidate commercial product ever emerges from the research. Worse, there's a good possibility that growing flesh without animals is going to require the liberal application of drugs: drugs to tell cells what to do and when, drugs to regulate a faux metabolism, drugs to get the fat-muscle balance right (exercise sure isn't going to do it), drugs to fend off opportunistic pathogens. The meat that results might just be full of drugs. Some safety testing will definitely be desirable, and that takes years.

Did PETA actually put a million dollars into escrow? My guess is they did not. No need. There won't be a commercial claimant by the deadline, so why fool around with escrow accounts when all you want is publicity anyway?

Funny, I bet there are thousands of news outlets and web sites that are weighing in on this topic, and not one actual journalist is checking to see if they put the funds into escrow.

Everyone's a pundit now. Fact-checking is too tedious, and would get in the way of writing opinions.