Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines.
Well, von Neumann was John McCarthy's menthor, and McCarthy made LISP. There's no wonder why programming code (e.g. functions) in LISP is data, and why LISP is heavily used in AI.
I suppose their memory holds both code and data?