MADS

Vegapunk directed MADS, a lawless research institute also called the Laboratory for Peace. Its run lasted thirteen years, spanning roughly thirty-nine to twenty-six years ago, until the World Government forced it closed. Vinsmoke Judge and Caesar Clown, both former members, would go on to establish a follow-up outfit named NEO MADS. The institute took the shape of an enormous paddle steamer that traveled the seas, raising a white flag reading PACIFIST, with MADS stamped on the hull next to the words Presented by LU FELD.

Beneath the peaceful image lay very different work. Three of its top minds, Scien, Judge, and Caesar, devoted themselves to devices of mass destruction, and the director Vegapunk was alone in developing anything genuinely meant for peace. One of the institute's signature feats was identifying the Lineage Factor, the so-called blueprints of life itself, an insight that opened the door to human cloning and gave rise to Stussy. So notable was the group that the World Government, feeling threatened, hunted it down and ultimately dissolved it.

Five people counted for the most inside the outfit. Vegapunk would climb to the rank of the world's foremost scientist and lead the Marines' SSG. Caesar Clown later devised the SMILE fruits. Vinsmoke Judge became king of Germa Kingdom and supreme commander of Germa 66. The cyborg Scien reached All-Star standing in the Beasts Pirates under the name Queen. Buckingham Stussy, calling herself a scientist while freeloading, had earlier crewed with the Rocks Pirates, gave birth to the ex-warlord Edward Weevil, and furnished the genetic pattern for the clone Stussy. Other minor researchers and helpers filled out the ranks.

Apart from the freeloader, each known member proved a gifted researcher who later held high office and delivered major advances. Their combined work reached across engineered gigantism, laser weaponry, synthetic Devil Fruits, human cloning, cybernetic enhancement, the reshaping of human bodies, and man-made diseases. All of it ran on money from Lu Feld, the Underworld's Loan Shark King, who also supplied the research ship the members used.

Set up thirty-nine years back with Vegapunk summoned as one of its founders, the group soon gained the seventeen-year-old Scien and, once the Rocks Pirates disbanded, Buckingham Stussy. At its peak four great scientists worked there, Vegapunk, Judge, Caesar, and Scien, while Stussy added little beyond the genetics for the clone Stussy, the first artificial life the group created. Because the world preferred Vegapunk's peaceful designs, among them a bloom made to sprout in gunpowder, over his colleagues' arms, the three villains squabbled over who ranked second.

What the group left behind reached far beyond its lifespan. The government took on Vegapunk and Caesar at Punk Hazard, where Vegapunk's Lineage Factor studies eventually gave rise to a synthetic copy of Kaidou's fruit and the Green Blood powering the Seraphim, while Caesar afterward churned out SMILEs for the Beasts Pirates. Judge applied that same research to grow fast-maturing clone troops and to alter his children; Scien rose to become Queen of the Beasts Pirates; and Stussy went on to bear Edward Weevil. The manufactured clone Stussy entered CP0 as an agent devoted solely to Vegapunk, later betraying the organization at his command.