If you need to use the latest versions of SciPy rather than the packaged version, without going through the hassle of building BLAS and LAPACK, you can follow the below procedure.
Install linear algebra libraries from repository (for Ubuntu),
sudo apt-get install gfortran libopenblas-dev liblapack-dev
Then install SciPy, (after downloading the SciPy source): python setup.py install
or
pip install scipy
As the case may be.