Vincenzo Tiberio

Vincenzo Tiberio (May 1, 1869 – January 7, 1915) was an Italian researcher and medical officer of the Medical Corps of the Italian Navy and physician at the University of Naples. During his medical studies at the Faculty of Medicine in Naples he noticed that when the walls of a well which supplied drinking water was cleaned off, the people who drank the well’s water complained of intestinal disorders. After further research he published a paper in 1895 on the antibacterial power of some extracts of mold, making him one of several researchers whose work on a mold/antibiotic connection anticipated the discovery of the drug penicillin by Alexander Fleming thirty-five years later (see: Penicillin - Discovery). At the time, his work was disregarded as coincidence and received no further study.