This paper investigates parent perspectives on potential future applications of neuroimaging and genetic research in the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) clinic: for prediction, diagnosis, and treatment choice. It does so with a reflective eye on parental motivations for discussing near but still uncertain technological futures, and with attention to the conceptual and normative difficulties that such time-travelling talk presents. Grounded in qualitative interviews with parents whose children had participated in an OCD neuroimaging and genetic research study in the United States, we situate parent discussions of imagined futures in their projections from difficult presents and into desired pasts. Parents reported apparently high receptivity to potential future technological scenarios, connected to central challenges they faced in relation to OCD. Yet when parents responded to questions about biomarker tests with the reply, 'yes, anything that helps', uncertainty, caution, and resistance were expressed in implicit negotiations over what it means to 'help'. This paper further considers what the analysis of parent perspectives can contribute to ongoing attempts to situate questions about biological selfhood and the ontological status of the brain and genes in the concrete specificities of individual lived experience; where knowledge is defined in relation to both the actions and rhetorics it facilitates.